Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We examined whether and how image’s semantics and emotion content interact during visual processing. In eachtrial, we briefly presented two emotional or neutral images (a scene context and an object), manipulating the semantic con-sistency and the emotional consistency of the pair. Participants categorised one image semantically or emotionally. Semanticcategorisation was overall better than emotional categorisation, but reduced in emotional compared to neutral images, and es-pecially in negative images. Emotional categorisation was better for positive than neutral or negative images; moreover, it wasfacilitated by emotional consistency and, for accuracy in context images, by semantic consistency. Our results show easinessof semantic compared to emotional categorisation. They suggest that semantic and emotion processes are interdependent, al-though emotional influence on semantic processing seems stronger than the counterpart, with in particular an interfering effectof aversive images. Conversely, image’s attractiveness seems beneficial when evaluating the quality of the emotional content.